Nice Sunset

Holding hands we walk the sunbright Avenue des Anglais,

Which overlooks the pebbly beach in Nice

Where college girls from Aix‑en‑Provence

Come to brown their breasts under a cobalt sky.

Joyce, my wife of thirty years,

Points out those halfnaked girls

I might otherwise have missed.

And after sunset we make love

In the shaft of moonlight which falls across our bed,

Her body against me as lovely as any I have seen by the sea.

We turn sixty this year, and I do not like it.

The glasses she must now wear to read,

Crease her face when she falls asleep,

A book against her chest.

Next to her, my daily hundred situps

Have not kept my waist from falling slack.

Thirty years ago, when my hair was long and thick,

I lay upon the rocks at Nice

And met a freckled, blond Parisian named Clotilde

Who found it funny I could not pull my eyes

From pink nipples I'd watched her smear with cocoa oil.

We talked with smiles and gestures, laughter aphrodisiac,

Made love three times in a room

I paid for all the way to Paris with my thumb.

I swore the night I slept along the Seine

A chilling drizzle, some bridge my shelter

I'd come back to France some day and stay in fine hotels.

As with Joyce I have.

I imagine meeting Clotilde again

As she was then, lean, longlegged and twenty,

And bringing her to my suite at the Negressco.

How hard would it be for her

To hide her disgust at the middle-aged man I've become?

As I lie awake and dream of the boy I once was,

Joyce stirs against me,

And I smell the fragrance she dabs behind each ear.

And I can taste her on my lips.

I brush a strand of hair off her face;

I do not see the lines around her eyes;

And I muse on something sweet unspoken:

I'd do it all over again, of course.

But I would not trade places,

Not even with myself.